Mixtape #1: Heat Wave
Ava Tichenor
Welcome to “Mixtapes,” our new weekly series of original playlists—inspired by our own respective, fondly remembered rituals of burning mix CDs for ourselves, special occasions, friends—aimed at capturing the essence of a particular feeling, moment, mood, or experience within the constraints of (roughly) the total audio minutes available on your standard compact disc. Every week, we’ll zoom in on something different, specific, and personally resonant and explore it with a shared playlist and some accompanying “liner notes.” Fresh mixtape published every Friday.
Liner notes
Yet another heatwave has descended upon the famously temperate, seasonlessly idyllic city of Los Angeles this uncharacteristically muggy summer, and from behind my sheer bedroom curtains, drawn across the French doors that open out onto my backyard, it looks, to me, just as it might on any typically mild L.A. day. My vantage point on the outside world has, admittedly, not shifted much more than a few feet in nearly a week.
My dearly cherished, still-functioning AC aside, I swear that, even from the comfort of the temperature-controlled indoors, I can still feel the outside atmosphere, its density oppressive, closing in on me. The air is thicker—I’m sure of it—and the irradicable coat of fine perspiration on my skin makes the bedsheets enveloping me feel uncomfortably damp, only to invoke a feverish chill when I toss them aside, exposing myself to the overcompensating cold air I have been unrelentingly pumping through the house for days.
I am utterly exhausted and still, somehow, intractably wired. I lie down, inviting sleep, only to toss, squirm, fidget, turn. A couple of times, I jolt upright and grab my laptop—if I’m not sleeping anyway, I may as well do something productive, I think—only to be once again overcome by the tremendous weight of my own body resisting gravity, a weariness so profound it inevitably flattens me back downward.
4:36 AM. Tonight—or, rather, this morning—my boyfriend’s soft snoring beside me doesn’t bestow the hypnotic, narcotic comfort that usually lulls me swiftly to sleep. Right now, as the sun nears the horizon, it feels almost offensive, mocking. Paired with the radiator-like heat of his still, sleeping body and the heaping piles in the near-dark, my all-too-familiar environment—the same one I haven’t left in days—feels uncanny, sinister, hostile. Binned stacks of half-folded clothing, vestiges of a closet cleanout started then abandoned. Unmounted wall shelving beside a power drill, a byproduct of intention without follow-through. A bag overflowing with unopened skincare products, a reminder of promise after unkept promise to myself—I’ll get around to washing my face, I tell myself again unconvincingly, just as soon as I finally get everything else in order.
Strewn across the bedsheets within reach: two unplugged iPhones, a ballpoint pen, my laptop underneath sheets of printouts and scrawled writing, a screw-top bottle containing one last swig of day-old wine. I kick them aside, still searching, to no avail, for stillness.
Months of trivial deferrals, each one effortless in its respective moment, have since compounded into something I can no longer escape—a chaos entirely of my own making. Tired at the sheer thought of all this—tomorrow, I tell myself, maybe I’ll do it tomorrow.
But, tomorrow is hot, too. The unabating swelter melds each consecutive day into the next, rendering the whole week one interminable waking fever dream, and the aspirations I pin on “tomorrow” evaporate as surely as do the distinctions between days themselves. Sapped of both the will and a “tomorrow” to defer to, here I sit, sweatily, with all of it, illuminated in stark relief by the glaring sunlight. Frozen in place, with no choice but to face where and how I presently find myself, a wave of cool and uninvited recognition fleetingly breaks clear through the heat—maybe it’s time I looked for a different view.
— Ava
TRACK LISTING
Living
Skullcrusher, And Your Song is Like a Circle (Dirty Hit, 2025)
The Governor’s Waltz
Phoebe Bridgers, Lost Weekend (Dead Oceans, 2026)
The Fig Tree
Matilda Mann, Kismet (Matilda Mann, 2026)
Not Me
Squirrel Flower, Say a Prayer to the Gods of Getting Along (Polyvinyl, 2026)
Eleven
Maverick Sabre [Single] (FAMM, 2026)
Forget About Dying
Gordi, Nylon (Mushroom, 2026)
One Wish
Snarls, In Heaven There’s Rainbows (Take This To Heart, 2026)
Hourglass
Widowspeak, Roses (Captured Tracks, 2026)
Insane Lullaby (feat. James Mercer)
Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse, Dark Night of The Soul (Parlophone, 2010)
Summerhead
Cocteau Twins, Four-Calendar Café (4AD, 1993)
Spitting Off the Edge of the World (feat. Perfume Genius)
Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Cool It Down (Secretly Canadian, 2022)
Sunshine Baby
The Japanese House, In the End It Always Does (Dirty Hit, 2023)
The Dreaming Moon
The Magnetic Fields, Get Lost (Merge, 1995)
Riddle
Beck Zegans, Engraving of Armor (Exploding In Sounds, 2026)
Invisible Man
The Breeders, Last Splash (4AD, 1993)
